Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/148

 CHAPTER XI

ASCLEPIADES, THE INTRODUCER OF GREEK MEDICINE INTO ROME

The seventh Ptolemy, Ptolemy Euergetes or Physcon, whose reign lasted from 146 to 117 B. C., drove all men of learning away from Alexandria and closed the famous schools in that city. It was only a few years after these events, and at a time when that city was fast losing its supremacy as the great centre of medical learning, that there appeared at Rome a Greek philosopher and physician who was destined to become the founder of a new set of medical ideas and of a new kind of medical practice. Being